For those of you who like to see me work, or want to know how I do stuff like skinning/texturing, I've something cool to show you.

This is a quick sketch I made:



Which I turned into this:



I've made another one of my video-tutorials, but this time it's both up to date with (basically) how I work on (Generations) skins nowadays, and it shows the process from sketch all the way to the result. I didn't go in and 'perfect' it, like I usually would do, because that would simply take too long, nevertheless, it's not really sub-standard work for me.

The downside is ofcourse that it's rather long (and large) because of that. The whole thing took me 2 and a half hours to finish, and the video speed is 10x actual. For those not wanting to do the math: it's about 15 minutes in length. The .avi weighs in at 80 Megs, so you've been warned ;]

You'll need the 'TSCC' codec to watch it. This is the TechSmith Camtasia Codec, which is what Camtasia's recorder makes. It's a good codec for this kind of 'desktop recording'

The codec can be downloaded here: http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/c...decdownload.asp

The movie can be downloaded here:
http://www.tabun.nl/dl/monster_01_making_silent.avi

d'Oh, one reply (thanks Washu ) - I really thought people would be interested. My bad :]

I'm very intrested and downloaded it and the codex but was not going to risk changing anything on my computer until I had recorded the entire series of Dr Who. Done it now, and intend to watch it this week.

Later....
I've now watched it and am impressed at the amount of work that goes in. Talent is not enough, you need dedication as well.

The eye impressed me the most, as it looked so 'round' , but I thought there was too much black around it, but what do I know.

I learnt 3 main things:
1  Keeping a palet of the colours you intend to use at hand.
2 when you filled in a background colour you then trimmed the edges with white. that helped to get the shape, rather then just add colour, which it what I've done on the few occations I've had to do anything like this.
3 the 'blur' or soften tool. Having no training or experance, for some reason I never thought to do it that way.


Also... for some reason I though you made the whole image in monochrome and lastly put the colours in. did I dream this? or did I hear it somewhere?

Shambler the impressed, who may now try to make a ut skin.

One suggestion I might propose, is perhaps you could write a documentation, on what is going on, because I am guessing that some people can't really identify your technique, I think I got it down though.

When adding lighting or color, you dribble some color in one area, and refine it with the blur tool; I see that this is the most used technique you use. You also use the dodge/burn tool as well. You use hotkeys alot too. In the detailing you use a base texture, use the stamp tool and brush them in, with an overlay or, soft light setting. That is all I can really identify at the moment.

Actually, what I use most often is the airbrush. The blur tool is used for turning hard edges into smooth gradients. I mostly use colours to define shadows and highlights, but every once in a while I might use dodge/burn. Not often though, because you have very little control over your colour that way - I advise to use the colour picker/a palette and the airbrush tool in general.

Shambler:
Although it appears I trim the edges with white, that is not the case. In fact I use the eraser tool to create the clean outline. That way, the object will be independant of its background. In that image, the background is white while I'm painting. You can see at the end of the movie that I switched it to a brownish hue, without affecting the paint layer.

Some painters prefer to work in monochrome for anything they do. I prefer working directly in colour for organics, because you get fresh and living colours that way, even though it's harder to do. For metallics, like weapon skins, I sometimes work in greyscale, then add colours later by using the 'select' tool and overlays (etc). The typical Strogg-style as seen in my Strogg weapon/item skins is all directly in colour though, much like this piece.

Washu:

My basic approach to this kind of thing (that is pre-sketched organics) is the following:
- 1: fill  in shape in the most common (usually a darker shade) colour.
- 2: airbrush harsh shadow and highlights and defining differently coloured areas
- 3: once I'm happy with the general shape (which is usually immediately with pre-sketched stuff), I select an area to detail, and pronounce the shadows and highlights with a litte more precision
- 4: within the selected area, I airbush the varying colours that I expect to be dominant for specific bits (like gum, the iris of an eye, teeth etc).
- 5: I use stronger edges on shadows/highlights in this area and use the blur tool to smooth them out if needed.
- 6: I airbrush details in the (smoothed) areas, usually with the 1-pixel brush.
- 7: When I'm done, I select an overlay texture (if needed), and overlay it on everything. Then I set the desired opacity, and set a null mask for the layer (black mask, nothing of it is visible).
- 8: I then proceed to airbrush white on the mask, so the texture becomes subtly visible in some areas. (I don't use the stamp tool)

And it's back to step 3, usually redoing what I don't like right after I tried something

Most of the stuff I do is entirely intuitive, I simply try something that feels right, work it out, and see if I like the result. If not, I paint over it again. You can see that I rarely ran into that while painting this little monster. For stuff that needs to be right, like Generations material, that'll happen a bit more often.

All the painting happens on one layer, but I sometimes (not in this case) keep a backup by copying the layer.

At about 9 minutes into the video, you see that I detected an inconsistency in the level of contrast of the head and body (forearm/paw area), and I went back to areas previously detailed to fix it.


Also, it's hard to make out what exactly is happening on the skin of that axe - can you post the 2d map?


Thanks for the comments posted, it's inspiring to read how much information/ideas you all get from that video.

The technique is much more like oil painting than I imagined it would be.

What edition of photoshop do you use Tab? I have paint shop pro 7,8,and 9 that I use for ALbum covers, but thats just photos and text etc.

CS 2 has a really good brush palllate, and I find it very useful. I customize all my UI for painting. You should get the tryout version of CS 2 Tab, just to check out the customizable menus you can create.

The biggest difference between 5.5 and 6+ is that the former does not have the same options for style/typography editing - you can play around with that a lot more in later versions. The rest of the changes aren't all that important, and I've never had any need for any updated filters or tools yet.
PS does load slow, but this isn't a problem for me, since it's almost always on when my editing rig is running anyway ;]

I'll be sure to give that CS2.0 a try when it is released. I'll probably be getting every Photoshop that will ever be released anyway :] - customizable tool windows sound marvellous in any case.

Small Update

I agree: the wood on the previous version also looked better than the new handle, to me.



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